Maybe not to you, but perchance I want a physical copy I can play when my Internet goes down.

Even simpler yet: Perchance that I want a physical copy I can load if the company goes out of business (with the patches on CD)

My friend had that problem on Vista. He installed NIS or somesuch package and the firewall was cutting off his access.

Stupid software firewalls :p

Take the Big 3:

Nintendo - Wii (Playon is building an interface for the Wii)

Sony - PS3

Microsoft - Xbox 360

Now what we need is numbers of the people that own Tivo boxes that also own any ONE of these three (or two if you just want to go current)

Realistically Tivo is fighting a diminishing game, and this comes from the owner of a Tivo HD. How many people own one of those 3 units above vs. a TivoHD? Which is cheaper, the PlayOn (30$) or TivoHD (300+ sub)?

I have a PS3 for Blu-Ray and can stream Netflix, Hulu, and other items straight from my PC using PlayOn ( www.themediamall.com ).

Too little, too late. Why take up the space on my PVR when I can live stream it from my PC?

Just my two pence.

On top of that, taking a cut of the sales is a major violation of our property rights.

You have no rights consumer! The copyright holder can, and will, revoke your ability to play at their whim. You don't think you really own the product, do you? Didn't you read the 350 page "license agreement" at all? Why, our team of lawyers worked months to come up with that obtuse document that's unreadable by anyone not in the legal profession, and it's copyrighted too! By the way we're suing you for talking about our game without our permission as permitted under the DMCA part two. You've damaged our ability to make money with our property, not your property, by disclosing the ending to one friend and loaning your disc without permission to another.

Now the scary thing is some nozzles in the industry think like that.

I'd agree with that if they'd give me 100% of my money back on any game I find not up to my standards at any point.

Not going to happen right? I don't blame them, it's impossible to please everyone all of the time. Oh wait, then we don't have to worry about making them happy here!

should really consider setting up a real "free speech" server zone should Sealand be offline. I don't like everything on the Internet, but 99.999999% of what I find objectionable shouldn't be illegal either. Still countries, in general, make the silliest things illegal. Child porn is one thing, and that is reprehensible, but simply criticizing the state?

So, what exactly makes games the special case?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing makes them a special case and this idiot knows it. He's dancing as fast as he can to try and get special privileges, which will then be extended to other things. This isn't exactly why Jefferson was afraid of Copyright, but it's close enough. Screw'em all. Reset the system to 14+14 plus continued protection of the character should they make new product with the character.

e.g.

Steamboat Willie (Mickey Mouse's first cartoon) would be public domain, but as long as they released a new Mickey flick / short every 28 years, they'd control the creative aspects of the character. Nobody else would be able to create new Mickey titles legally. Heck, I'd even go with toughening the enforcement at that point.

Copyright was never intended to be a perpetual annuity, but an incentive for the artist to create more. I'm against piracy, by both sides.